Last Wednesday Canada experienced another brush with global terrorism, when Aaron Driver was killed during a violent encounter with police in the sleepy southern Ontario town of Strathroy.

No one but Driver was killed in the incident, but the fear-mongers were quick to tell Canadians that the intent of this deranged Islamic supporter of Daesh was to commit mass murder at a transit hub during a workday rush hour. Scary stuff.

According to the official version of events, it was the FBI who first discovered that Driver had made a recent martyrdom video and was about to launch an attack. It had to be the FBI because the Canadian Security Intelligence Service insists that it does not spy on Canadians.

Driver had long publicly declared his sympathy for the Daesh cause and, as a result, had been arrested prior to signing a peace bond to secure his release.

Thus, Driver was known to local authorities and, acting on the FBI tip, the police were able to descend upon Driver’s abode as he was climbing into a taxi armed with his homemade explosive devices.

Terry Duffield was the driver of Leo’s Taxi cab who picked up Driver, and while he has yet to speak publicly to the media, he is probably wondering why the already alerted police allowed him to pick up Driver before they raced to block them in.

Once the police vehicles arrived, Driver detonated an explosive in the back seat and Duffield, unhurt, took that as his cue to exit his taxi. Police then opened fire on Driver and it remains unclear if the Daesh-wannabe died from their bullets or from his own bomb.

Of course, this incident immediately set off the usual wave of panic among the Chicken Littles with cries for stricter controls to protect the public. If Driver could still obtain explosives and plan an attack while on a peace bond, then obviously peace bonds are not enough to protect us, ran their logic. “Who will save us from Daesh?” they questioned.

First of all, Driver was a troubled youth who found popularity among Daesh sympathizers online. He was not a hard-core member of the Daesh evildoers. He had never even been to the Middle East, and the congregation at his local mosque tried to correct his skewed take on the Islamic faith.

He did make some sort of bomb, but if the result was that exploding it in his own lap failed to kill him and left the taxi driver unhurt, it really wasn’t much of a bomb.

The intelligence and security services — both Canadian and U.S. in this case (because Canadians don’t spy on Canadians) — worked efficiently together.

Driver did not get to carry out a terror attack. He was killed before he could even attempt the attack. No one was terrorized by his actions. Yet after Driver’s death we were told of all the carnage he ‘would have’ created, therefore making it imperative to impose stricter security measures and better monitoring to keep the public safe.

This follows a steady trend of thwarted so-called terror attacks in Canada, which may have had bloodthirsty objectives but actually had no real means to commit them.

First it was the ‘Toronto 18’ plotters back in 2006. They were going to blow up the Parliament Building and the CN Tower, then behead CBC news anchor Peter Mansbridge during a live telecast. All they possessed in order to achieve these goals was the fake explosives sold to them by undercover RCMP agents. They never even had a bomb.

Then it was the bizarre plot to derail a VIA Rail train in 2013. Poor old Chiheb Esseghaier and his accomplice Raed Jaser may have wanted to create a bloody massacre by targeting a New York-bound train from Toronto, but they were so clueless that they scouted out a bridge on the wrong side of town. They, too, never had any actual explosives.

Neither did John Nuttall and Amanda Korody, although the RCMP convinced them that they did. Armed with inert pressure cooker bombs prepared for them by undercover officers, Nuttall and Korody wanted to blow up the legislature building in Victoria, B.C. They were promptly arrested by the same officers who helped them plot the terror attack.

The separate lone wolf attacks by Martin Couture-Rouleau and Michael Zehaf-Bibeau in October 2014, which killed Warrant Officer Patrice Vincent and Corporal Nathan Cirillo respectively, are the only actual attacks in Canada to date. Like Driver, they were deranged loners, not members of an international terror network.

To prevent panic, let’s keep focused on the damage these attackers actually cause, and not get carried away by all the terrible things they ‘would have’ done.

espritdecorps

canadian military magazine

Esprit de Corps is a Canadian military magazine covering issues related to Army, Navy, Air Force, national defence, security and foreign policy. We also publish Canadian military history pieces and veterans news.